The quality of a radio link between a base station (BS) (or eNB) and a user equipment (UE) may be degraded due to various factors. When the UE fails to receive a control signal from the BS (for example, if a physical downlink control channel (PDCCH) is correctly decoded), this may be defined as a Radio Link Failure (RLF). To handle the RLF, the UE first detects a problem at a physical layer and attempts to solve the physical layer problem. If the UE fails to recover from the physical layer problem, the UE may transmit a connection re-establishment request to the BS, after determining that an RLF has been detected.